Michael Braun's Blog

On Thursday, Brittany and I went to see Al Gore’s film ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ To summerize the film, it’s basically Al Gore delivering a slideshow about global warming. That may be the most boring sentence ever constructed, containing both the words Al Gore and Slideshow. That being said, the movie was fabulous. It was highly informative about global warming, the dangers, the causes, and what we can do to stop it. It was very motivating, the takeaway message being that we need the political will to reverse global warming. Regime change was certainly a common theme, though never openly stated. Al Gore was warm, approachable, and extremely knowledgeable. You could tell he was very prepared to talk about a subject he has been concerned about for a long time. I thought the movie was excellent.

In addition to the theme of regime change, there was a lot of talk about the wonders of human society. This was presented as a key reason why we ought to work to reverse global warming. If we do not, the entire human race is at risk. Now I know that uniting the world’s people against a common foe is an important first step towards finding a solution to any problem, be it poverty, terrorism, or a hole in the ozone layer, but I couldn’t help look out onto human society and think about whether we are worth saving or not. In the end, I started to wonder – what’s so great about human society anyway?

We haven’t figured out how to live in peace with each other, as hundreds of thousands of people die because of war every year. We often can’t even figure out how to get along with those around us. Think how many people you know have beef with their roommates, their close family, their co-workers. We can’t figure out how to treat nature so that it survives. And our focus on money and posessions drives some of the greatest evil the world has ever seen.

We’ve made advances, to be sure. But these technological advances have often hurt the earth and fellow humans just as much as they have helped us. Every advancement that has helped us keep peace has also helped us better wage war. And all our mechanical advances have kept global warming a serious concern. We’ve worked to make things more equal, but comparing all people worldwide, the richest to the poorest, and you realize that wealth is not distributed very equally at all. One man has everything he could ever want, another lies in the street starving to death, these two men separated by mere miles. I can have something shipped overnight from Japan, but I can’t seem to find a way to feed a starving child in Africa as quickly.

So would it be such a bad thing if the human race were to go extinct? We’d be the first species with the brainpower and knowledge to understand our own deaths who actively worked to bring an end to our entire species. It’ll be nuclear bombs or global warming.

I’ve read this quote a few places. Google tells me it’s from Edna St. Vincent Millay. “I love humanity, but I hate people.” This woman was an idiot. Humanity is what will bring an end to their own life on earth. We work actively to destroy ourselves, as a species. But humans, individual people, are what make life worth living. If you support the ideas behind this quote, and you have friends, I hope that you never move, because the chances you will make friends in your location seem slim to none. If you really hate people, then these few friends you have must be very rare and wonderful folks. I support the opposite of this quote. Humanity has destroyed the earth, but I choose to try to save the human species because I would really miss the friends that I have, those wonderful individuals who bring me so much pleasure.

If you take any sort of higher power out of the entire equation, then the human species should be free to do whatever it wants. We should be free to kill ourselves. Our lack of adapatability should spell our doom, just like any other species facing massive change. But it’s that darn notion that we are created by some higher power who wants us here on earth, who has CREATED US, nonetheless. If that is the truth, then why should we worry about global warming? God wants us here and he wouldn’t do anything to go against that. He’ll save us, by golly!

Too bad that’s not the case. I believe that humans can survive, but maybe our time is up. In the end, whoever arrives next, I suspect, will give us nothing but mixed reviews.